Thirteen Years Later, the Crescent Moon Still Has a Castle

Almost thirteen years ago, while deployed, I was working through ideas for a book. The images I shared recently came from those rough drafts: a crescent moon carrying a castle, a wolf against the moon, a ship crossing a field of stars.

They were pieces of a world rather than a finished explanation of it. Looking at them together, there is already a sense of scale: a place small enough to fit inside a moon, an animal large enough to become part of the sky, a journey continuing beyond the edge of the picture.

An image can wait

An unfinished idea can be awkward to return to. There is a temptation to judge it by everything you know now, or to treat the years between then and now as a deadline you missed. But a rough draft has another use. It shows you what caught your imagination before you had decided what to do with it.

The castle on the crescent moon is wonderfully direct. It gives you a destination and immediately makes you wonder how anyone gets there. You can start asking about the people who live inside, the view from a window, or what happens when a ship approaches. One drawing contains several invitations.

A different way into the world

When we began making the Infinity Illustrated motion graphic, the hourglass became a way to travel. The camera could move towards a grain of sand, find a beach, cross the water, climb through clouds and reach space. The journey gave those older images somewhere to belong.

The challenge was making the passages feel connected. Moving from clouds into an illustrated space scene changes more than the location; it changes how the world is drawn. The transition needed to carry the viewer across that difference. Returning through the hourglass gave the journey a way home—and a reason to begin again.

The book idea did not have to become a book in order to contribute something. An image could become a destination inside a moving sequence. A composition could suggest the next shot. What began on one page could take another form without losing the thing that made it interesting.

Keep the rough drafts

That is one reason I wanted a sketchbook space in this journal. Finished work tells you what someone chose. Rough work lets you see what they were considering: the strange combinations, the unresolved scale, the image that seemed worth keeping even without a story to explain it.

I am not presenting these drawings as a completed book, or pretending every old idea needs to become a project. I want to give some of them another look. The crescent moon still has a castle. Now there is a camera travelling towards it.

Infinity Illustrated.
Embrace Tomorrow.